Read Meet Me in the Moon Room for Free Online Page B

this?” Lewis asked. “What exactly do we hope to accomplish?”
    “I want us to experience what most of the rest of the world claims to experience all the time,” Stuart said. “Before the evening is over, I want each of us to know what it is like to believe the unbelievable.”
    “No matter how hard we try,” Marilyn said, “I don’t think we’ll get ghosts just because we want to.” She didn’t look up when she spoke.
    “You’re right,” Stuart said. “We are all unapologetic materialists. We’ll need a little help.” He would say no more until after dinner. No one complained. The delay was part of the ritual, too.
    After dinner, they regrouped in the parlor. There was a fake fireplace with an electric fire. There was a round table in the middle of the room. On the table was a single black candle. To one side was a bar. Lewis spotted it at once and poured himself a drink.
    “What?” he said when he caught them all looking at him.
    “I have picked ghosts for us to believe in,” Stuart said, “because I think we can use a mental aid that will make it easier.”
    Bill joined Lewis at the bar and mixed a drink for himself. He raised an eyebrow at Elizabeth but she shook her head no.
    “We’ll have to make our own ghost,” Stuart said. “You can think of it as a game. The game for tonight. The main event. One of us will become a ghost. The degree to which that person becomes a ghost will depend on how strongly the rest of us believe that person is a ghost.”
    “You’re talking about me,” Lewis said.
    “Why you?” Stuart asked.
    “Odd man out.”
    “Actually,” Stuart said, “I was thinking we’d draw straws. Look, I’ve already set it up. Short straw is the ghost.” He took the straws he had prepared earlier from his jacket pocket.
    “Here, you go first, Marilyn.” He pushed the straws in front of her face. “Go on, pick one.”
    She sighed and took a straw. He saw that she had gotten the short one. He hadn’t exactly planned it that way. In fact, he had been holding back. He knew how to force a card or, in this case, a straw. He had learned that trick in a psych course taught by a magician when he was a grad student, but he didn’t think he’d used it on Marilyn. No one else knew the rest of the straws were redundant, so he went through the entire exercise letting each of them pick one. There was one left in the end for him. He held his up and everyone did the same. It was easy to see that Marilyn would be the ghost.
    “Our ghost person, let’s call her Marilyn.” He smiled at her. “She is merely a focus of attention. After all, what is a ghost but the point of concentrated desire?”
    “Fear?” Lewis asked. “Concentrated fear?”
    “In the unlikely event that this works,” Bill said, “I mean, if I can convince myself that Marilyn really is a ghost, then she’ll disappear.”
    “Why disappear?” Elizabeth asked.
    “Because I don’t believe in ghosts,” Bill said.
    “You mean, if you believe Marilyn is a ghost, you won’t be able to see her, because you don’t believe in ghosts?”
    “You got it,” Bill said. “It’s a Zen of Physics kind of thing.”
    They were talking about Marilyn as if she weren’t there, Stuart thought. It was working already. He hated to break the momentum but he needed to get her moving. She wouldn’t be much fun as a ghost if she just sat there looking ill and pathetic. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he said. “Marilyn?”
    “What do you want me to do?” Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.
    “Be a ghost,” Stuart said. “You’ve got this ideal spooky place to haunt, so go haunt. Pass on to the other side. We’ll light the candle and sit around the table and hold hands and call you back with pure belief.”
    Marilyn pushed herself up out of her chair and walked to the heavy metal door. Her shoulders slumped as if she were thinking she’d never be able to get it open, but then she must have remembered the